Improving model performance in mapping cropland soil organic matter using time-series remote sensing data

Faced with increasing global soil degradation,spatially explicit data on cropland soil organic matter(SOM)provides crucial data for soil carbon pool accounting,cropland quality assessment and the formulation of effective management policies.As a spatial information prediction technique,digital soil mapping(DSM)has been widely used to spatially map soil information at different scales.However,the accuracy of digital SOM maps for cropland is typically lower than for other land cover types due to the inherent difficulty in precisely quantifying human disturbance.To overcome this limitation,this study systematically assessed a framework of“information extractionfeature selection-model averaging”for improving model performance in mapping cropland SOM using 462 cropland soil samples collected in Guangzhou,China in 2021.The results showed that using the framework of dynamic information extraction,feature selection and model averaging could efficiently improve the accuracy of the final predictions(R^(2):0.48 to 0.53)without having obviously negative impacts on uncertainty.Quantifying the dynamic information of the environment was an efficient way to generate covariates that are linearly and nonlinearly related to SOM,which improved the R^(2)of random forest from 0.44 to 0.48 and the R^(2)of extreme gradient boosting from 0.37to 0.43.Forward recursive feature selection(FRFS)is recommended when there are relatively few environmental covariates(<200),whereas Boruta is recommended when there are many environmental covariates(>500).The Granger-Ramanathan model averaging approach could improve the prediction accuracy and average uncertainty.When the structures of initial prediction models are similar,increasing in the number of averaging models did not have significantly positive effects on the final predictions.Given the advantages of these selected strategies over information extraction,feature selection and model averaging have a great potential for high-accuracy soil mapping at any scales,so this approach can provide more reliable references for soil conservation policy-making.

Mapping and understanding degradation of alpine wetlands in the northern Maloti-Drakensberg, southern Africa

The alpine terrestrials of the Maloti-Drakensberg in southern Africa play crucial roles in ecosystem functions and livelihoods,yet they face escalating degradation from various factors including overgrazing and climate change.This study employs advanced Digital Soil Mapping(DSM)techniques coupled with remote sensing to map and assess wetland coverage and degradation in the northern Maloti-Drakensberg.The model achieved high accuracies of 96%and 92%for training and validation data,respectively,with Kappa statistics of 0.91 and 0.83,marking a pioneering automated attempt at wetland mapping in this region.Terrain attributes such as terrain wetness index(TWI)and valley depth(VD)exhibit significant positive correlations with wetland coverage and erosion gully density,Channel Network Depth and slope were negative correlated.Gully density analysis revealed terrain attributes as dominant factors driving degradation,highlighting the need to consider catchment-specific susceptibility to erosion.This challenge traditional assumptions which mainly attribute wetland degradation to external forces such as livestock overgrazing,ice rate activity and climate change.The sensitivity map produced could serve as a basis for Integrated Catchment Management(ICM)projects,facilitating tailored conservation strategies.Future research should expand on this work to include other highland areas,explore additional covariates,and categorize wetlands based on hydroperiod and sensitivity to degradation.This comprehensive study underscores the potential of DSM and remote sensing in accurately assessing and managing wetland ecosystems,crucial for sustainable resource management in alpine regions.

Recent progress and future prospect of digital soil mapping： A review

To deal with the global and regional issues including food security, climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss, water resource management, and ecosystem health, detailed accurate spatial soil information is urgently needed. This drives the worldwide development of digital soil mapping. In recent years, significant progresses have been made in different aspects of digital soil mapping. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a review for the major progresses of digital soil mapping in the last decade. First, we briefly described the rise of digital soil mapping and outlined important milestones and their influence, and main paradigms in digital soil mapping. Then, we reviewed the progresses in legacy soil data, environmental covariates, soil sampling, predictive models and the applications of digital soil mapping products. Finally, we summarized the main trends and future prospect as revealed by studies up to now. We concluded that although the digital soil mapping is now moving towards mature to meet various demands of soil information, challenges including new theories, methodologies and applications of digital soil mapping, especially for highly heterogeneous and human-affected environments, still exist and need to be addressed in the future.

Mapping Soil Salinity Using a Similarity-based Prediction Approach:A Case Study in Huanghe River Delta,China

Spatial distribution of soil salinity can be estimated based on its environmental factors because soil salinity is strongly affected and indicated by environmental factors. Different with other properties such as soil texture, soil salinity varies with short-term time. Thus, how to choose powerful environmental predictors is especially important for soil salinity. This paper presents a similarity-based prediction approach to map soil salinity and detects powerful environmental predictors for the Huanghe(Yellow) River Delta area in China. The similarity-based approach predicts the soil salinities of unsampled locations based on the environmental similarity between unsampled and sampled locations. A dataset of 92 points with salt data at depth of 30–40 cm was divided into two subsets for prediction and validation. Topographical parameters, soil textures, distances to irrigation channels and to the coastline, land surface temperature from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer(MODIS), Normalized Difference Vegetation Indices(NDVIs) and land surface reflectance data from Landsat Thematic Mapper(TM) imagery were generated. The similarity-based prediction approach was applied on several combinations of different environmental factors. Based on three evaluation indices including the correlation coefficient(CC) between observed and predicted values, the mean absolute error and the root mean squared error we found that elevation, distance to irrigation channels, soil texture, night land surface temperature, NDVI, and land surface reflectance Band 5 are the optimal combination for mapping soil salinity at the 30–40 cm depth in the study area(with a CC value of 0.69 and a root mean squared error value of 0.38). Our results indicated that the similarity-based prediction approach could be a vital alternative to other methods for mapping soil salinity, especially for area with limited observation data and could be used to monitor soil salinity distributions in the future.

A case-based method of selecting covariates for digital soil mapping

Selecting a proper set of covariates is one of the most important factors that influence the accuracy of digital soil mapping(DSM).The statistical or machine learning methods for selecting DSM covariates are not available for those situations with limited samples.To solve the problem,this paper proposed a case-based method which could formalize the covariate selection knowledge contained in practical DSM applications.The proposed method trained Random Forest(RF)classifiers with DSM cases extracted from the practical DSM applications and then used the trained classifiers to determine whether each one potential covariate should be used in a new DSM application.In this study,we took topographic covariates as examples of covariates and extracted 191 DSM cases from 56 peer-reviewed journal articles to evaluate the performance of the proposed case-based method by Leave-One-Out cross validation.Compared with a novices’commonly-used way of selecting DSM covariates,the proposed case-based method improved more than 30%accuracy according to three quantitative evaluation indices(i.e.,recall,precision,and F1-score).The proposed method could be also applied to selecting the proper set of covariates for other similar geographical modeling domains,such as landslide susceptibility mapping,and species distribution modeling.

Mapping Detailed Soil Property Using Small Scale Soil Type Maps and Sparse Typical Samples

Soil type maps at the scale of I Z 1 000 000 are used extensively to provide soil spatial distribution information for soil erosion assessment and watershed management models in China. However, the soil property maps produced through conventional direct linking method usually suffer low accuracy as well as the lack of spatial details within a soil type polygon. This paper presents an effective method to produce detailed soil property map based on representative samples which were extracted from each polygon on the 1 ： 1 000 000 soil type map. The representative sample of each polygon is defined as the location that can represent the largest area within the polygon. The representativeness of a candidate sample is determined by calculating the soil-forming environment condition similarities between the sample and other locations. Once the representative sample of each polygon has been chosen, the property values of the existing typical samples are assigned to the corresponding representative samples with the same soil type. Finally, based on these representative samples, the detailed soil property map could be produced by using existing digital soil mapping methods. The case study in XuanCheng City, Anhui Province of China, demonstrated the proposed method could produce soil property map at a higher level of spatial details and accuracy： 1） The soil organic matter （SOM） map produced based on the representative samples can not only depict the detailed spatial distribution of SOM within a soil type polygon but also largely reduce the abrupt change of soil property at the boundaries of two adjacent polygons. 2） The Root Mean Squared Error （RMSE） of the SOM map based on the representative samples is 1.61, and it is 1.37 for the SOM map produced by using conventional direct linking method. Therefore, the proposed method is an effective approach to produce spatial detailed soil property map with higher accuracy for environment simulation models.

Digital mapping of soil salinization based on Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data combined with machine learning algorithms

Soil salinization is one of the most important causes of land degradation and desertification,especially in arid and semi-arid areas.The dynamic monitoring of soil salinization is of great significance to land management,agricultural activities,water quality,and sustainable development.The remote sensing images taken by the synthetic aperture radar(SAR)Sentinel-1 and the multispectral satellite Sentinel-2 with high resolution and short revisit period have the potential to monitor the spatial distribution of soil attribute information on a large area;however,there are limited studies on the combination of Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 for digital mapping of soil salinization.Therefore,in this study,we used topography indices derived from digital elevation model(DEM),SAR indices generated by Sentinel-1,and vegetation indices generated by Sentinel-2 to map soil salinization in the Ogan-Kuqa River Oasis located in the central and northern Tarim Basin in Xinjiang of China,and evaluated the potential of multi-source sensors to predict soil salinity.Using the soil electrical conductivity(EC)values of 70 ground sampling sites as the target variable and the optimal environmental factors as the predictive variable,we constructed three soil salinity inversion models based on classification and regression tree(CART),random forest(RF),and extreme gradient boosting(XGBoost).Then,we evaluated the prediction ability of different models through the five-fold cross validation.The prediction accuracy of XGBoost model is better than those of CART and RF,and soil salinity predicted by the three models has similar spatial distribution characteristics.Compared with the combination of topography indices and vegetation indices,the addition of SAR indices effectively improves the prediction accuracy of the model.In general,the method of soil salinity prediction based on multi-source sensor combination is better than that based on a single sensor.In addition,SAR indices,vegetation indices,and topography indices are all effective variables for soil salinity prediction.Weighted Difference Vegetation Index(WDVI)is designated as the most important variable in these variables,followed by DEM.The results showed that the high-resolution radar Sentinel-1 and multispectral Sentinel-2 have the potential to develop soil salinity prediction model.

Progress and prospects in Chinese Antarctic surveying, mapping and remote sensing studies

Antarctic surveying, mapping and remote sensing is one of the important aspects of the Chinese Antarctic geoscience research program that stretch back over 25 years, since the first Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition （CHINARE） in 1984. During the 1980＇s, the geodetic datum, height system and absolute gravity datum were established at the Great Wall and Zhongshan Stations. Significant contributions have been made by the construction of the Chinese Great Wall, Zhongshan and Kunlun Stations in Antarctica. Geodetic control and gravity networks were established in the King George Islands, Grove Moun- tains and Dome Argus. An area of more than 200 000 km2 has been mapped using satellite image data, aerial photogrammetry and in situ data. Permanent GPS stations and tide gauges have been established at both the Great Wall and Zhongshan Stations. Studies involving plate motion, precise satellite orbit determination, the gravity field, sea level change, and various GPS applications for atmospheric studies have been carried out. Based on remote sensing techniques, studies have been undertaken on ice sheet and glacier movements, the distributions of blue ice and ice crevasses, and ice mass balance. Polar digital and visual mapping tech- niques have been introduced, and a polar survey space database has been built. The Chinese polar scientific expedition manage- ment information system and Chinese PANDA plan display platform were developed, which provides technical support for Chi- nese polar management. Finally, this paper examines prospects for future Chinese Antarctic surveying, mapping and remote sens- ing.

An Object-based Approach for Two-level Gully Feature Mapping Using High-resolution DEM and Imagery： A Case Study on Hilly Loess Plateau Region, China

Gully feature mapping is an indispensable prerequisite for the motioning and control of gully erosion which is a widespread natural hazard. The increasing availability of high-resolution Digital Elevation Model(DEM) and remote sensing imagery, combined with developed object-based methods enables automatic gully feature mapping. But still few studies have specifically focused on gully feature mapping on different scales. In this study, an object-based approach to two-level gully feature mapping, including gully-affected areas and bank gullies, was developed and tested on 1-m DEM and Worldview-3 imagery of a catchment in the Chinese Loess Plateau. The methodology includes a sequence of data preparation, image segmentation, metric calculation, and random forest based classification. The results of the two-level mapping were based on a random forest model after investigating the effects of feature selection and class-imbalance problem. Results show that the segmentation strategy adopted in this paper which considers the topographic information and optimal parameter combination can improve the segmentation results. The distribution of the gully-affected area is closely related to topographic information, however, the spectral features are more dominant for bank gully mapping. The highest overall accuracy of the gully-affected area mapping was 93.06% with four topographic features. The highest overall accuracy of bank gully mapping is 78.5% when all features are adopted. The proposed approach is a creditable option for hierarchical mapping of gully feature information, which is suitable for the application in hily Loess Plateau region.

The digital mapping produced with satellite image of the Zhongshan Station area in Antarctica

Ice and snow domint the land features in Antarctica. The great brightness and poorcontrast of ice and snow and streaking noise in satellite image make the procedure of image processing difficult. On the other hand however, the contrast between bare rock land/sea water and ice/snow is so high that the details of image will be overcompressed.In the light of characteristics of satellite image in Antarctica, a filtering to remove streaking noise has adn discussed. Based on automatic identify classification to enhance the details of objects and the method and theory of digital rectification of satellite image with ground control points measured from field survey are also presented.

THE GLOBAL BIFURCATION STRUCTURE OF A KIND OF DIGIT MAPPING

The global structure of the mapping is studied. The symmetric unconnected substructures of T2 is coincident with [1] by computer, but for n=3 the symmetry of these substructures vanishes. As n is increasing, the global bifurcation structure of Tn is shown. Finally, similar results for the mapping are also proved.

The digital mapping of satellite images under no ground control and the distribution of landform, blue ice and meteorites in the Grove Mountains, Antarctica

The colorful satellite image maps with the scale of 1∶100000 were made by processing the parameters-on-satellite under the condition of no data of field surveying. The purpose is to ensure the smooth performance of the choice of expedition route, navigation and research task before the Chinese National Antarctic Research Expedition (CHINARE) first made researches on the Grove Mountains. Moreover, on the basis of the visual interpretation of the satellite image, we preliminarily analyze and discuss the relief and landform, blue ice and meteorite distribution characteristics in the Grove Mountains.

The Digital Mapping of Ukrainian Soils on the Base of High Resolution Space Images

The first Ukrainian using experience of multispectral space scanning for digital soil mapping is described in this paper. Methodical approaches for detailed soil observation of Ukrainian forest regions are elaborated based on modem mapping principles. For the first time in Ukraine, digital soil maps based on GIS （geographic information system） were obtained for individual farms. In GIS based on space images and digital relief models, the medium-scale and large-scale soil maps were created by geo-statistical methods. According to elaborated methods, modem digital soil mapping should provide all combined works： remote sensing and traditional soil observations. The modem digital soil mapping should be based just on quantitative principles： on remote sensing data, geomorphologic field parameters, and chemical analyses. The methodological approaches, which were used for the first time in Ukraine during digital soil mapping by remote sensing methods, are described in this paper.

Spatial-temporal variations and driving factors of soil organic carbon in forest ecosystems of Northeast China

Forest soil carbon is a major carbon pool of terrestrial ecosystems,and accurate estimation of soil organic carbon(SOC)stocks in forest ecosystems is rather challenging.This study compared the prediction performance of three empirical model approaches namely,regression kriging(RK),multiple stepwise regression(MSR),random forest(RF),and boosted regression trees(BRT)to predict SOC stocks in Northeast China for 1990 and 2015.Furthermore,the spatial variation of SOC stocks and the main controlling environmental factors during the past 25 years were identified.A total of 82(in 1990)and 157(in 2015)topsoil(0–20 cm)samples with 12 environmental factors(soil property,climate,topography and biology)were selected for model construction.Randomly selected80%of the soil sample data were used to train the models and the other 20%data for model verification using mean absolute error,root mean square error,coefficient of determination and Lin's consistency correlation coefficient indices.We found BRT model as the best prediction model and it could explain 67%and 60%spatial variation of SOC stocks,in 1990,and 2015,respectively.Predicted maps of all models in both periods showed similar spatial distribution characteristics,with the lower SOC in northeast and higher SOC in southwest.Mean annual temperature and elevation were the key environmental factors influencing the spatial variation of SOC stock in both periods.SOC stocks were mainly stored under Cambosols,Gleyosols and Isohumosols,accounting for 95.6%(1990)and 95.9%(2015).Overall,SOC stocks increased by 471 Tg C during the past 25 years.Our study found that the BRT model employing common environmental factors was the most robust method for forest topsoil SOC stocks inventories.The spatial resolution of BRT model enabled us to pinpoint in which areas of Northeast China that new forest tree planting would be most effective for enhancing forest C stocks.Overall,our approach is likely to be useful in forestry management and ecological restoration at and beyond the regional scale.

Assessment of soil total phosphorus storage in a complex topography along China's southeast coast based on multiple mapping scales

Soil phosphorus (P) plays a vital role in both ecological and agricultural ecosystems, where total P (TP) in soil serves as a crucial indicator of soil fertility and quality. Most of the studies covered in the literature employ a single or narrow range of soil databases, which largely overlooks the impact of utilizing multiple mapping scales in estimating soil TP, especially in hilly topographies. In this study, Fujian Province, a subtropical hilly region along China’s southeast coast covered by a complex topographic environment, was taken as a case study. The influence of the mapping scale on soil TP storage (TPS)estimation was analyzed using six digital soil databases that were derived from 3 082 unique soil profiles at different mapping scales, i.e., 1:50 000 (S5),1:200 000 (S20), 1:500 000 (S50), 1:1 000 000 (S100), 1:4 000 000 (S400), and 1:10 000 000 (S1000). The regional TPS in the surface soil (0–20 cm) based on the S5, S20, S50, S100, S400, and S1000 soil maps was 20.72, 22.17, 23.06, 23.05, 22.04, and 23.48 Tg, respectively, and the corresponding TPS at0–100 cm soil depth was 80.98, 80.71, 85.00, 84.03, 82.96, and 86.72 Tg, respectively. By comparing soil TPS in the S20 to S1000 maps to that in the S5map, the relative deviations were 6.37%–13.32%for 0–20 cm and 0.33%–7.09%for 0–100 cm. Moreover, since the S20 map had the lowest relative deviation among different mapping scales as compared to S5, it could provide additional soil information and a richer soil environment than other smaller mapping scales. Our results also revealed that many uncertainties in soil TPS estimation originated from the lack of detailed soil information, i.e., representation and spatial variations among different soil types. From the time and labor perspectives, our work provides useful guidelines to identify the appropriate mapping scale for estimating regional soil TPS in areas like Fujian Province in subtropical China or other places with similar complex topographies. Moreover, it is of tremendous importance to accurately estimate soil TPS to ensure ecosystem stability and sustainable agricultural development, especially for regional decision-making and management of phosphate fertilizer application amounts.

Optimal path finding algorithms based on SLSD road network model

A solution to compute the optimal path based on a single-line-single-directional（SLSD）road network model is proposed.Unlike the traditional road network model,in the SLSD conceptual model,being single-directional and single-line style,a road is no longer a linkage of road nodes but abstracted as a network node.Similarly,a road node is abstracted as the linkage of two ordered single-directional roads.This model can describe turn restrictions,circular roads,and other real scenarios usually described using a super-graph.Then a computing framework for optimal path finding（OPF）is presented.It is proved that classical Dijkstra and A algorithms can be directly used for OPF computing of any real-world road networks by transferring a super-graph to an SLSD network.Finally,using Singapore road network data,the proposed conceptual model and its corresponding optimal path finding algorithms are validated using a two-step optimal path finding algorithm with a pre-computing strategy based on the SLSD road network.

Underwater Terrain Positioning Method Based on Least Squares Estimation for AUV

To achieve accurate positioning of autonomous underwater vehicles, an appropriate underwater terrain database storage format for underwater terrain-matching positioning is established using multi-beam data as underwater terrainmatching data. An underwater terrain interpolation error compensation method based on fractional Brownian motion is proposed for defects of normal terrain interpolation, and an underwater terrain-matching positioning method based on least squares estimation（LSE） is proposed for correlation analysis of topographic features. The Fisher method is introduced as a secondary criterion for pseudo localization appearing in a topographic features flat area, effectively reducing the impact of pseudo positioning points on matching accuracy and improving the positioning accuracy of terrain flat areas. Simulation experiments based on electronic chart and multi-beam sea trial data show that drift errors of an inertial navigation system can be corrected effectively using the proposed method. The positioning accuracy and practicality are high, satisfying the requirement of underwater accurate positioning.

Three-dimension path planning for UAV using improved A＊ algorithm in complicated threat environment

In order to improve the battle effectiveness of the unmanned aerial vehicle （UAV） under the increasingly complex threat environment, a three-dimension path planning method based on an A ＊ al- gorithm is proposed and simulated in this paper which makes the UAV satisfy requirements of different missions. At first, the digital map information is processed vdth an integrated terrain smoothing algorithm, and a safe flight surface which integrates the vehicle dynamic is built and added on the terrain, and then, models of the complicated threats are established and integrated into the digital terrain. At last, an improved A ＊ algorithm is used to plan the three-dimension path on the safe sur- face, and then smooth the path. Simulation results indicate that the approach has a good perform- ance in creating an optimal path in the three-dimension environment and the path planning algorithm is more simple, efficient and easily realized in the engineering field.

Application of RgMap system on digital regional geological survey

Digital geological mapping fundamentally broke through the traditional working pattern,successfully carried out the geological mapping digitalization.By using the RGMAP system to field digital geological mapping,the authors summarized the method of work and the work flow of the RGMAPGIS during the field geological survey.First,we prepared material,set up the PRB gallery,then put the geographic base map under the background maplayer and organizing the field hand map,forming the field factual datum map.At last,the geological space database is formed.

Effect of Altitude Error on Position Precision of Double-Star Position System

The effects of two kinds of methods for obtaining altitudes on the position precision are analyzed, and the error expressions are deduced. Many simulation results show that in the two cases, the effects of the same altitude errors on the positioning precision are identical, and the rules that the two altitude errors affect positioning precision can be expressed as that altitude error has little effect on the east-west position error, but has large effect on the south-north position error.